Unbelievable, especially when it’s about his speaking style.
We already knew, because he has told us for years, he uses the best words, such as stupid rather than incompetent — not that he would ever apply either to himself.
Don’t we all think we use the best words?
Like many families, I suspect, if we can’t find a word to cover a situation, we just make up something.
For instance, to us, scroffling around means scrabbling about looking for something, possibly in vain, in a basement, handbag or a place where order may be in short supply (in my case, any part of my house).
I am not sure who came up with it. Was it a mix of scrabble and shuffle?
(Unbeknown to us, that word already existed, according to a website featuring obsolete and obscure words. Its references say it was around in an English dialect in 1904, meaning to shuffle or hobble about with difficulty. Scroffling feet at the end of the 1800s were tootsies covered with corns.)
We carry on childhood expressions well past their use-by date. The fire alarm which blasts its way into our eardrums in Broad Bay and Portobello is forever "the naughty noisy", courtesy of the Last Born, and kilometres are klompettyklomps, thanks to one of my nephews.
But back to Donald. The emergence of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who can string a few words together in an understandable way, has highlighted The Donald’s incoherence.
So much so, he has been moved to come up with a name for his strange word webs.
Rather than these being a weakness or suggesting his decrepitude, he reckons he is showing a brilliance. What’s more, it is appreciated by other great minds.
He says his meaningless mangling is doing "the weave". Not quite as much fun as the hokey cokey.
"You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. And it’s like, and friends of mine that are like, English professors, they say: ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen’," he told the faithful in Pennsylvania.
The great minds he talks of are not falling over their syntax to pay homage to his superiority. There has been no epidemic of accolades for his brilliant weaving of mindless meanderings on subjects as disparate as bacon sales, wind power, electrocution and cannibal killers.
Columbia University professor linguist John McWhorter says it is rambling, not weaving, and the verbal equivalent of somebody being extremely drunk. Ouch.
But while Donald might not be capable of the weave, outside his own head, we three sisters gathered in a motel knew we could do it.
A sister’s story about a complaint around a new service station sign sidetracked into a convoluted not-for-a -family-newspaper story involving a colonoscopy, was interrupted by a tangent about the smell of the motel liquid soap (I was overwhelmed while another sister was underwhelmed), drifted into the still-to-be-resolved question of how many berry-dusted (I heard that as fairy-dusted) chocolate-dipped almonds constitutes a single serving (impossible maths unless you can establish how many almonds there are in 20g without scales and when an unknown amount of the 300g packet has already been scoffed), why the girl scout sister did not have scales in her travel kit, and threats from said sister not to complete the service station story if we didn’t shut up.
At some point, for a reason unrecorded for posterity, the other sister confessed she has not listened to anything her 20-something daughter has said since she was 4, preferring the blame game to active listening.
It was only after who-knows- how-many single servings of the fairy-dusted almonds the other sister mustered the energy to eventually complete the original story.
As Prof McWhorter says, casual speech is much less tidy than we may think it is.
In our family discussions, how many times do we stop to say, "now where was I going with this"?
Sometimes that question hangs uncomfortably in the air and the point is never remembered.
In our defence, talking about not very much in an undisciplined way is handy when you have had enough of talking about important stuff such as how well the stretched public healthcare system is serving frail elderly relative, worrying what will happen next for her since we don’t have a magic wand, and wondering how many other people are sharing similar unsettling experiences.
We’re telling ourselves it’s not quite the same as spouting endless gibberish when you are trying to convince people to elect you as the next president of the United States of America.
You choose who is the most delusional.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
